Andrew Litten ‘Head of a Dying Man’
oil on canvas   .   90 x 90 cm 


ENQUIRE ABOUT THIS WORK



Andrew Litten is a British artist, born in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire in 1970. He currently works from his studio in Fowey, Cornwall. 

His dynamic and gestural figurative paintings express a strong interest in the universal complexity of everyday existence. Dealing with humanistic themes such as love, sensuality, fear, anger, loss, nostalgia, mundanity, personal growth and perceived identity normality or disturbance. Paintings are created with an unguarded, empathetic attitude, like so many expressionistic artists, a rawness of approach combined with an often viscous application of paint is also key to the extreme experience felt from the work. Gesture and nuance inspire extreme emotive reading, perhaps subversive, tender, passionate, ambivalent, malevolent or compassionate, our response becomes one of allure or repulsion.

Litten is a self-taught artist leaving art college as a teenager having found it to be too restrictive to his aspired method of working. For a decade he created mostly small-scale works using humble domestic or found materials (including envelopes and assembled furniture parts). The work made at this time deliberately challenged ideas of art elitism and art as commodity. He then moved to Cornwall in 2001 and chose to begin exhibiting. Early success came when his work was included in an exhibition titled ‘Nudes’ in New York City, (along with Jacob Epstein and Pierre-Auguste Renoir), where his work was highlighted and reviewed by the New York Times. Shortly after he had four consecutive solo exhibitions each of which included publications at Goldifsh Fine Arts in Penzance, Cornwall. Other notable exhibitions included ‘Move’ at Vyner Street, London, during Frieze Art Week 2007, where his work ‘Dog Breeder’, created as a twisted and emphatic anti-art statement, was exhibited. He was also included in ‘No Soul For Sale’ at Tate Modern Turbine Hall, London in 2010. In 2012 he held a major solo exhibition at Millennium in St Ives, Cornwall and that year was given a guest solo exhibition at L13 Light Industrial Workshop, London. He has also held large-scale solo exhibitions at Spike Island and Motorcade FlashParade in Bristol. Ordinary Bodies, Ordinary Bones was conceived with support from The Arts Council, UK and will be exhibited at Anima Mundi in 2018. Works have been included in numerous international curated mixed exhibitions in Berlin, Dublin, Siena, Milwaukee and New York City and in Venice during the 54th Biennale. Most recently paintings have been exhibited in four major museums in China. Andrew Litten paintings feature in numerous international private and public collections. He is represented by Anima Mundi.